Ted Hughes - Telegraph Obituaries Ted Hughes Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, who has died aged 68, made his mark in 1957 with his first volume The Hawk in the Rain; the four decades that followed confirmed him as a leading poet of his generation, though his celebrity meant he had to weather a storm of speculation about the suicide of his first wife Sylvia Plath. Photo: AP Comments The energy, muscular force and the occasional violence of Hughes's poems were noticed from the beginning; he went on to create a body of work which has been widely read, sometimes imitated, sometimes parodied. After Hughes accepted the office of Poet Laureate in 1984, it was soon forgotten that Philip Larkin had been the expected choice (though it later emerged that Larkin had refused the offer). Hughes had something of the air of a tribal bard, a shaman who had entered into some mystical union with nature and assumed the forms of its creatures in the cave of his mind. Outside the cave lay the modern world and all he felt had been lost to the tribe, all that was elemental and instinctive.

In contrast to the poems of his predecessor as Laureate, John Betjeman, with their bourgeois surface, those of Hughes used brutal, masculine fistfuls of words to exult in an England as a land of myths and predators whose "manners were tearing off heads". Hughes was a farmer, and his poetry grew from close observation of nature, as in his description of a fly as a "freshly barbered sultan royally armoured/ In dusky rainbow metals". Edward James Hughes, always known as Ted, was born on August 17 1930, in the depths of the Calder Valley in the Yorkshire Pennines. Mytholmroyd, the place of his birth, lies in a hidden part of a mixed hilly area, part agricultural, part industrial. Related Articles Karl Miller 30 Sep 2014 His father Bill was at the time a carpenter, one of only 17 men of his regiment who returned from the Dardanelles disaster during the First World War; and that war was a central presence in Ted Hughes's thought from childhood. The moorland and the war merged together.

Later, in his autobiographical essay The Rock, he wrote: "I can never escape the impression that the whole region is in mourning for the First World War." The Hughes family moved, when Ted was eight, to South Yorkshire, where - through some inherited money from his mother Edith's family - his parents bought a newsagent's in Mexborough. Ted won a scholarship to the local grammar school, where he came under the influence of John Fisher, the English master, a keen nurturer of talent. Ted wrote poems, some of them published in the school magazine. He won as a prize a copy of Robert Graves's The White Goddess, which argues that true poets derive their inspiration from a primitive, matriarchal moon deity, since displaced by male values of rationality. The book was to remain a most powerful influence on Hughes's poetic thinking - the moon was a favourite image in his work - and its argument would contribute to Hughes's attempt to construct a systematic theory of Shakespearean tragedy in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992). In 1948 Hughes won an Exhibition in English to Pembroke College, Cambridge.

But before taking up his place, he did his National Service as an RAF ground wireless mechanic in the East Riding of Yorkshire. At the small station there was "nothing to do but read and re-read Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". Up at Cambridge, he spent his first two years (1951-53) supervised by Matthew Hodgart, whose personality and deep knowledge of the old English ballads he found congenial. But the grimly Leavisite attachment to "English" as the basis of all enlightenment was not one Hughes shared, and in his third year he moved to Archaeology and Anthropology. His first published poem as an adult appeared in Granta in June 1954. He had already become known to a few literary undergraduates, such as Philip Hobsbaum, of Downing, who held regular discussion meetings about poetry which Hughes sometimes attended; these were the germ of what became known as "the Group". During the first months after graduation, when Hughes was working here and there as a rose gardener, nightwatchman and zoo keeper, he published a few more poems in such Cambridge periodicals as Chequer, and in an anthology of Cambridge poetry edited by Karl Miller, also from Downing.

I N THESE first graduate years (1954-56), Hughes frequently returned to Cambridge. In February 1956, at a party to launch the short-lived St Botolph's Review, of which Hughes was a founding figure, he met a young American postgraduate from Newnham - Sylvia Plath. From then on during her lifetime and long after her death, the names of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes would be inextricably conjoined. After her first encounter with Hughes, Sylvia Plath described him in a letter to her mother as "a large, hulking, healthy Adam . . . with a voice like the thunder of God". Within a few months they became engaged, and soon afterwards were married. From the beginning it was, and for some years continued to be, an extremely close, intertwined relationship. Each gave the other much in the way of literary models, criticism, stimulus and support. She was probably more practical, professional and ambitious, in the sense that her background gave her an instinct for the right moves to make: clean typescripts, stamped addressed envelopes, and also a notion of which were the proper journals and covetable prizes. He gave her a deeper, perhaps quieter, sense of purpose.

It was Sylvia's entry on Ted's behalf of a collection of typescript poems which, in late 1956, won him a first-publication award for The Hawk in the Rain. The judges were W H Auden, Marianne Moore and Stephen Spender. This ensured publication by Faber in London and Harper in New York in late 1957. Thus began Hughes's upward literary career, a career only occasionally deflected. A succession of poems, children's books and plays followed, and, for a few years, a number of reviews by him in journals, not all of which have been reprinted. Hughes was never properly a literary journalist, but there were times when he was a regular reviewer of children's stories, folklore, poetry, letters, anthropology and ecology. His second book of poems, Lupercal, came in 1960. It contained several of the "animal" poems by which he came best known: Hawk Roosting, View of a Pig, An Otter, Pike, Thrushes. These began to be included in anthologies. In the 1960s, Hughes was accepted (in the words of A Alvarez) as "a poet of the first importance".

But that decade also brought Hughes the break-up of his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her suicide. These events marked him deeply, and remain part of the literary-biographical mythology. Sylvia Plath had a history of psychological difficulties and breakdowns before she met Hughes. He was undoubtedly unfaithful, most crucially with Assia Wevill, the wife of a Canadian poet living in London. This affair touched off the end of the marriage. Before this, Hughes and Sylvia Plath had had two children, Nicholas and Frieda, both of whom lived with Sylvia after the separation. On Sylvia's death in February 1963, the responsibilities thrust on Hughes were enormous. For a time he wrote little, and of that little, much was hack-work. The relationship with Assia Wevill ended in an even worse tragedy, in which Assia Wevill killed first their infant daughter, Shura, and then herself. Three years later, Hughes began his climb back with Wodwo (1967), a miscellany of poems and stories, an awkward mixture which on the whole was not well received, though some of the poems - Thistles and Skylarks - are among his best.

Wodwo is the questing beast encountered by Gawain as he searches for the Green Knight. One of the stories in the miscellany, Sunday, is a crucial autobiographical piece, drawing on a childhood memory of a brutal moment in Yorkshire. Then, gradually, Hughes began to build up the sequence of poems which, when it was published as Crow in 1970, marked his breakthrough as not only "a poet of the first importance", but as an altogether dominant figure among his contemporaries and juniors. Crow, dedicated to Assia Wevill and Shura, was immediately seen, even by its detractors, as an important work. Grimly funny, inventively pessimistic, though rhythmically and verbally repetitive, it broke many rules and created "a new hero", as one reviewer sardonically commented. Hughes also remarried in 1970. Carol Orchard, who became his second wife, was the daughter of a farmer friend in Devon with whom Hughes worked. Trained as a nurse, she possessed a sensible practicality which gave Hughes a firm base, something he needed in the years ahead, as the legend or myth of Sylvia Plath grew, creating many tensions and bringing forth many accusations.

Carol Hughes helped him in all this, as she helped him in the beginnings of the Arvon Foundation, an attempt to give amateur writers tutelage under the direction of professionals. One of the Arvon houses, Lumb Bank in Heptonstall, close to his birthplace, was for many years owned by the Hughes family; the other, Totleigh Barton, was not far from the Hughes house in Devon, and the two spend much time planning and furnishing these places, along with the other Arvon organisers. D URING the 1970s, Hughes published Season Songs (1975), Gaudete (1977) and several books for children. He had earlier begun to write children's books - texts for picture-books, the story of The Iron Man (which quickly became a classic), and plays such as The Coming of the Kings, widely produced in schools. He also published his Selected Poems 1957-1967 (1972), which rejected much and rearranged his already large output.

Remains of Elmet (1979) is a sequence that juxtaposed poems by Hughes with photographs by Fay Godwin of part of the Pennine world where Hughes spent much of his childhood. Moortown (1979) collected four disparate sequences, the first, the "Moortown" itself, drawing on what Hughes called "passages taken from a verse farming diary that I kept for a while" in Devon. These Moortown poems are exact and sometimes powerful, in spite of the informality which "diary" might suggest. Wolfwatching (1989) in a sense goes back to the close observation of individual creatures which Hughes put into Lupercal almost 30 years earlier, as did Flowers and Insects (1986), a more lightweight book. But his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1984 had already begun to push him in the direction of writing celebratory poems - perhaps not so much celebrations of of royal persons and occasions, but instead hymns to the mystical, mythical sense of a "complete vision of royalty and nationhood".

These were poems which were more parodied than praised - as was to be expected when royalty itself was often seen as vulnerable, even absurd. Ted Hughes was, throughout his adult life, a private man, firm, shy, quietly - and occasionally boisterously - humorous in company, amiable but withdrawn. He was physically impressive, tall, broad-shouldered, with a massive head, nose and chin and with a deep voice that never lost its deliberate West Riding vowels. He was a most distinctive reader of his own poems, when he could be persuaded to read them: gently, modestly introducing them, he might then plunge into the horrors of the Crow poems, on occasion causing some in the audience to faint. In a subdued way, he did much to promote various causes - creative writing in schools, various "green" movements, and at an earlier stage was a selector for the Poetry Book Society and an organiser of literary festivals. But he had little taste for literature as a business. Nevertheless, his marriage to Sylvia Plath and his subsequent role in the administration of her posthumous affairs thrust him into the public eye.

Indeed, it was Hughes who published Ariel (1965), the posthumous collection of poems that properly made Sylvia Plath's name. Editing her work, being made responsible for her later reputation, he was inevitably torn between benefiting financially from the rewards (which were considerable) and distancing himself from a painful experience. The cleverly and carefully organised publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters early in 1998 seemed to bring a triumphant reassessment of these matters. These 80-odd poems were presented by the publisher as a revelatory account, written over a period of 25 years but now seen for the first time, by the survivor of the tempestuous relationship between Hughes and Plath. Extravagant things were said in reviews about the poems' importance and their excellence. There was a distinct frisson, a shock of the new. A few more sober commentators pointed out that several of these poems had already appeared in the final section of Hughes's New Selected Poems 1957-1994.

It was also clear to a few discerning readers that half a dozen or so poems in that final section clearly concerned the "other woman" Assia Wevill; and that Hughes had not included these in Birthday Letters. Nevertheless, such excitement was aroused by this intimate confessional sequence that Birthday Letters rapidly became a best-seller in a way that had not been seen since the publication of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems 10 years earlier. A little earlier, Hughes also won much acclaim for his Tales from Ovid, a sequence of translations, written with varying degrees of freedom, from Ovid's Metarmorphoses. This won the Whitbread 1998 Book of the Year award. Ted Hughes was appointed OBE in 1977 and OM earlier this year. Some of Hughes's poems will almost certainly survive as among the most distinctive of the period. But what is yet to come is a full assessment of his life with Sylvia Plath, and of what followed her death. Published October 30 1998 Cambridge Authors » Hughes as Poet Laureate Zadie Smith Hughes as Poet Laureate Undergraduate Kathryn Maude's essay evaluates the work Hughes produced as Poet Laureate.

She finds that he places a great deal of emphasis on the monarchy as a unifying totem in society - but with limited success. A Nation's a Soul With a Crown at the hub To keep it whole. Ted Hughes became Poet Laureate in 1984, charged with chronicling in verse the births, marriages and deaths of the Royal Family. He filled the post until his own death in 1998. The poems he wrote as laureate, collected in Rain-Charm for the Duchy, are often criticised as stylistically poor and have been censured in some quarters for their unquestioning patriotism. So, why did Hughes become Poet Laureate, and how did writing to order affect his poetic imagination and tone? Even a cursory glance at Hughes's Laureate poems suggests that his patriotism was heartfelt and entirely real. He became laureate at a difficult time for the monarchy and Sean O'Brien suggests that his response to this was 'to take the task entirely seriously and write more directly [...] in honour of the institution of the monarchy than might now be supposed possible' (in The Deregulated Muse, p. 38 - see Further Reading below).

The epigraph at the beginning of the collection Rain Charm for the Duchy seems unambiguous in this respect, with the country portrayed as a wheel 'With a Crown at the hub | To keep it whole'. The Royal Family, as Hughes depicts it, is the nation's crutch in difficult times, a hub around which the whole country revolves. It could be argued that he is writing to the Royal Family: the poems can be seen as one man's homage to a great institution and its living representatives. In poems like 'The Dream of the Lion', composed for the Queen Mother on her eighty-fifth birthday, a sense of reverence is conveyed particularly strongly. According to Hughes, the three Lions (his capitalisation) in this poem represent the Queen Mother herself (a play on her maiden name Bowes-Lyon), her astrological sign (Leo), and the Lion on the royal coat of arms, which he describes as the 'totem animal of Great Britain' (you can find this quotation - and the last one in this paragraph - in Appendix 1 of Collected Poems).

The final lines describe how 'the Dream of the Lion / Dropping from air as manna dew, / Cleansing all, condensed on you / And the climbing sun revealed you, the Lion'. This addresses the Queen Mother directly, portraying her as a chosen figure anointed from on high by the spirit of Britain, the so-called 'Dream of the Lion'. The idea that this poem, at least, could be a personal, as well as a public, tribute to the Queen Mother is hinted at in the notes, as Hughes recalls that he first made the link between the Lion in the Queen Mother's surname and the Lion on the coat of arms 'during my boyhood obsession with the animal kingdom and my boyhood fanatic patriotism'. Writing poems for the Royal Family has brought out the child in Hughes that revered and respected the Crown, and they are pervaded by an atmosphere of deference. However, the laureate poems could never solely be addressed to the Royal Family. They are designed to be public celebrations of important events in that family's life.

Each of the poems in Rain Charm for the Duchy And Other Laureate Poems was originally published in a newspaper, so Hughes had to take into account his wider readership as well as the wishes of the Royal Family. In the notes to 'A Masque for Three Voices', Hughes actually states that he had 'taken pains to make [it] as accessible as possible' (Collected Poems, Appendix 1). It has been suggested that Hughes did not rise to the challenge of writing for these two very different audiences. A. Alvarez suggests that, with the exception of Birthday Letters, Hughes's better poems were written earlier on and in later life 'his duties as Poet Laureate seemed to have got the better of him' (this quotation can be found in The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, ed. Nick Gammage (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 210). There appears to be a consensus that, in trying to make his poems accessible, Hughes lost the immediacy and depth found in collections such as Crow.

When discussing the laureate poems, Sean O'Brien draws attention to 'Hughes's adoption of the careful plainspokenness more usually found in his work for children' (The Deregulated Muse, p. 39). 'A Masque for Three Voices' exemplifies this with stanzas like 'Being British is the mystery / That it is you or you or you or me? / I do not understand how this can be'. A kinship between the poet and the readership is sought as Hughes addresses us directly, and the simple rhyme scheme and rhythm echo the sing-song cadence of a nursery rhyme. The historical sections of the poem are reminiscent of the programmes that fill dead hours in TV schedules: the Top Ten Dictators or the Top Twenty Great Moments of the Twentieth Century. The beginning of section three reads: Einstein bent the Universe Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced The new age with a tweet. Again there is a simple rhyme scheme, abcbdb, and a strong rhythm with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Apparently to Hughes accessible poetry rhymes and has a strong rhythm.

It seems a little patronising that his work addressing the public at large is reminiscent of his work for children, as if the meaning of the poems needs to be spelt out to the masses in case they don't get it. The notes Hughes wrote to explain the laureate poems are longer than those for any other collection. The weight of symbolism is enormous and a few key images are repeated again and again. There is a preoccupation with unity and a history measured not in years but in the passing of generations. The crown features large in this mythology of the Royal Family; its circle symbolises both the unity of the people under the Queen and the continuity of the royal line as it is passed from one member of the family to the next. 'A Masque for Three Voices' begins: A royalty mints the sovereign soul Of wise man and of clown. What substitute's debased those souls Whose country lacks a crown. Here the crown is described in , as a precious metal that elevates the 'base' souls of humanity to higher things. It also assumes that both the 'wise man' and the 'clown' will, following the prompts of their 'sovereign' souls, bow down to their sovereign.

A remark O'Brien makes about the laureate poems as a whole has particular relevance here, as he states that 'the social order is justified by the fact of its existence...The central, impossible part of Hughes's task here is to resurrect it through a myth of consolation' (The Deregulated Muse, p. 39). Hughes seems to believe that the Royal Family is its own justification and speaks of the monarchy as it was in the past, when it truly was the focal point for the country. The myth Hughes attempts to perpetuate is that the Royals are still seen as the unifying force in the country today, which many would be quick to deny. This mythical upholding of the monarchy is attempted through the evocation of a kinship between the peoples of Britain, which is again symbolised by the crown. Hughes states that in war time 'our sacred myth, the living symbol of a hidden unity, the dormant genetic resource, turned out to be the Crown' (Appendix 1, Collected Poems). In 'A Birthday Masque' the Crown is linked to the 'ring of the people', a Native American concept from the memoir of the Sioux Shaman Black Elk.

The 'ring of the people' is the unity of a group of people in a society. The section entitled 'The Ring' describes all the different groups of invaders that arrived in Britain and merged to become one people, paralleling this with the forging of a crown out of many different metals. It depicts: a melt of strange metals To be folded and hammered [...] Till millionfold It is formed, is the living Crown of a kingdom The ring of the people. Different metals are combining to make a crown, and under that Crown the people combine to make a nation: the two circles of the crown and the people mirror each other. The only problem with this image is that it has little relevance to the world in which Hughes actually lived. Rand Brandes notes that 'Hughes' poetry resists history through...his belief in the healing capabilities of ritual and myth' (in The Challenge of Ted Hughes, p. 156, see Further Reading below). In this case this assessment is a valid one. The historical fact that the monarchy is losing its significance as the world changes is ignored, as Hughes focuses on the comforting myth of unity; one people under one crown.

Seamus Heaney is correct when he remarks on Hughes as one of three poets who are 'hoarders and storers of what they take to be the real England' (in The Achievement of Ted Hughes, p. 19, see Further Reading). To Hughes, the real England is symbolised by the monarchy. Another interesting aspect of Hughes' laureate poems is the link they create between animals, the land and the monarchy as three unchanging constants. His first poem as laureate was 'Rain-Charm for the Duchy - A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of HRH Prince Harry'. This parallels the rain falling on the land Harry is to inherit with the holy water poured on Harry at his christening. The land and Harry are portrayed as inseparable, with the moors paying homage to the birth of the new royal child: 'I imagined the two moors / The two stone-age hands / Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering'. The animals in the laureate poems also pay homage to the Royal Family, notably in 'A Birthday Masque' when the birds of England come together to find the Crown.

The final stanza reads 'Thirty birds / Searching for God / Have found a Queen...Sixty wings / Making a crown'. The Queen is the representative of God on earth, as the head of the Church of England. The birds find the Queen when searching for God and they realise that their own wings, in a circle, can make the crown. All of the aspects of the country are united under the crown, in the myth if not in fact. On balance, the critical opinion lies with Tony Harrison, a fervent anti-monarchist, who wrote a poem entitled 'Laureate's Block' after Hughes's death noting that 'It's not for Laureate poems we'll miss Ted Hughes'. Ted Hughes is not missed for his Laureate poems, but the poems he wrote for the Royal Family do give an interesting insight into a patriotism and unity of purpose that is now only a myth. Further Reading Seamus Heaney, 'Englands of the Mind' in Finders Keepers (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). This is a helpful comparison between the England of Ted Hughes' poetry with the Englands found in Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill.

It has an interesting section on the rhythm of the poetry and its relation to the land. Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998). Sean O'Brien sees Ted Hughes' Laureate poetry as reflecting the opinions and preoccupations of the upper classes. In Hughes' poetry overall, he suggests that the denial of politics can be read as an implicit call to maintain the status quo. The Achievement of Ted Hughes ed. by. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); and The Challenge of Ted Hughes ed. by Keith Sagar (London: Macmillan, 1994). These two books of critical essays edited by Keith Sagar are also useful, as they give a broad overview of all Hughes' poetry and show a variety of critical opinions. Further Thinking Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, described the job as basically thankless, and found that it gave him writer's block. Do you think Hughes' laureate poems display some of this difficulty? Kathryn Maude's essay makes use of Sean O'Brien's negative view of these poems.

In O'Brien's view, they let themselves and their readers down by not questioning the political system enough. Do you agree? Alchemy, practised by alchemists, was a branch of occult philosophy with a particular interest in creating special substances through processes not unlike chemistry. Two of their most famous goals were immortality (by means, for example, of the philosopher's stone), and turning base metals to gold. This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Hughes . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Obituary: Ted Hughes | The Independent Obituary: Ted Hughes Friday 30 October 1998 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture WHEN SIR John Betjeman died in 1984, it was widely felt that his obvious successor as Poet Laureate would be Philip Larkin. Larkin, however, made it abundantly clear that he would refuse the position, and the availability of Ted Hughes seemed at the time providential.

His subsequent conduct of the office made it seem that he could only ever have been the logical choice. Not only did this imposing, craggily handsome Yorkshireman look the part - more so than any Laureate since Tennyson - but he used the post to continue on a more public stage his campaign for the imagination and against what he saw as our despiritualised and disembodied civilisation. The Laureateship became significant in an almost unprecedented way. The division between the public and private faces of the poet was none the less profound, partly because of a temperamental desire for privacy, partly because of the catastrophes which haunted his adult life. Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930. In a prose reminiscence he recalled how a much older brother would take him out shooting, "and I had to scramble into all kinds of places collecting magpies and owls and rabbits and weasels and rats and curlews that he shot". His earliest encounters with nature were associated with a seemingly natural violence. At the same time, the child Hughes fished daily, beginning what was to be a lifetime sport. Violence of another kind was inscribed into his family history.

Hughes's father was a survivor of Gallipoli, who seems never to have recovered from the horror of his experiences. Hughes was to remember combing his father's hair; "After mother's milk," he wrote, This was the soul's food. A soap-smell spectre Of the massacre of innocents. So the soul grew. A strange thing, with rickets - a hyena. No singing - that kind of laughter. Behind these grim lines we can hear a vehement repudiation of Wordsworth's "Fair seedtime had my soul". Hughes was eight when his family moved to Mexborough, an industrial town, where his parents opened a small shop selling tobacco and stationery. Appalled, his brother left home to become a gamekeeper, but Hughes looked back on the move with gratitude because soon he discovered first a farm, then a private estate, on which he could continue his exploration of the natural world in solitude. "My friends were town boys, sons of colliers and railwaymen, and with them I led one life, but all the time I was leading this other life on my own in the country. I never mixed the two lives up.

I still have some diaries that I kept in those years: they record nothing but my catches." Early, he learnt the privacy essential to poetry, which he began to write when he was 15 and attending the local grammar school. Hughes's natural ability in literary studies led to his winning a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where for his first two years (1951-53) he read English. He enjoyed it, but found writing essays increasingly difficult until, late in his second year, after unsuccessfully wrestling half the night with an essay, he went to bed and had a dream. What he saw was "a fox, but the size of a wolf". The creature approached Hughes's desk and "spread its hand - a human hand as I now saw, but burned and bleeding like the rest of him - flat palm down on the blank space of my page. At the same time it said, `Stop this - you are destroying us.' Then as it lifted its hand away I saw the blood-print . . . in wet, glistening blood on the page." Hughes changed course and spent his final year reading Archaeology and Anthropology.

After completing his degree, Hughes drifted for a couple of years, living largely in London, working for a time in Slough, revisiting Cambridge. He was variously a rose- gardener, a zookeeper, a nightwatchman. In 1955 Hughes met, and in 1956 married, an American poet two years younger than himself, Sylvia Plath. At first they lived in Cambridge, where Hughes worked as a teacher, then in 1957 went to the United States. Hughes taught at Amherst, Plath at Smith, then they spent time together at Yaddo, the writers' retreat. However, Plath had entered Hughes's work for a prestigious American competition which he won, and the publication of The Hawk in the Rain (1957) established him immediately as a leading younger British poet. The linguistic energy with which Hughes conveyed sense-experience owed something to Hopkins, but his voice was all his own. At the same time, some critics feared that the poet was attracted to violence in an amoral, Nietzschean way, a charge which echoed through the whole of his career.

In December 1959 the young couple returned to England, where they lived first in London, then in Devon. In April 1960 they had a daughter, Frieda, and in January 1962 a son, Nicholas. The publication of Lupercal (1960) had confirmed Hughes's reputation and won him further prizes. The marriage, though, became increasingly troubled. Plath had been hospitalised after a suicide attempt well before she met Hughes. Paradoxically, his influence on her as a writer was entirely beneficial, but his interest in shamanism perhaps led her to attempt to confront her demons too nakedly. In a late poem, Hughes remembered bitterly the writing- table he made for her and "the sweat I soaked into / Finding your father for you and then / Leaving you to him." The formal, ambitious, inert clockwork of Plath's earlier poems was replaced by something much darker, stranger, maybe never completely achieved but unforgettable in the work of the last months of her life. As the marriage deteriorated, Hughes fell in love and began a relationship with Assia Wevill, the wife of a fellow poet.

Plath was undone by his infidelity, and in October 1962 she asked him to leave. In December she moved to London with their children. During January 1963 Plath became seriously depressed, and on 11 February she committed suicide by gassing herself. Whether she meant to die or not is still a vexed question. Hughes destroyed the final volume of her journal because he did not want her children to see it, but with his sister Olwyn he oversaw the publication of the writing which secured her legend. Plath's death was over the years to force Hughes into reclusiveness. As her reputation grew, and she became a feminist icon, many women came to see him as responsible, as an archetypally bad patriarch. Her grave was repeatedly defaced (to remove her married name) and Hughes's public appearances were susceptible to disruption, which meant that a charismatic performer was largely lost to the poetry- reading circuit. Hughes was entirely successful in protecting the privacy of his and Plath's children into adult life but the dignified silence with which he largely confronted his accusers never satisfied them.

Tragedy redoubled itself when Assia Wevill gassed herself and Shura, her daughter by Hughes. Hughes's writing deteriorated: his next adult volume, Eodwo (1967), has some spectacular moments but is distinctly uneven, while Crow (1972) is his spectacular worst. In the interim, though, he had begun what was to be an extremely successful career as a writer for children. The Iron Man (1968) has proved an enduring favourite. He began writing plays and continued to write prose fiction, though neither is of great importance to his reputation. Hughes played a major part in the establishment in 1968 of the Arvon Foundation. Under its auspices thousands of aspirant writers have received professional tuition on residential courses; indeed, for some years he lent the foundation a cottage he owned at Lumb Bank, in Devon. His Poetry in the Making (1967) gathered a series of radio talks on creative writing for the young. Hughes's permanent commitment to poetry in education rested on his belief that through writing we could get back in touch with the souls and bodies repressive modern rationalism had stolen from us.

Crow, dedicated "In Memory of Assia and Shura", is a caricaturist's scream of horror. Hughes explained it as an example of trickster mythology, but no amount of theoretical underpinning can redeem the volume's thin rhetoric. Yeats defined rhetoric as the will doing the work of the imagination, and the unevenness of Hughes's later writing can be explained by the tension between the two. Cave Birds (1975) is as harsh and willed as Crow. Gaudete (1977) is a quasi-religious horror story set in an English village, almost unintelligible as narrative but with some firm descriptive moments. Remains of Elmet (1979), originally a collaboration with the photographer Fay Godwin, is a set of Yorkshire poems which are often very moving. In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, with whom he lived happily in Devon until the end of his life: in Moortown (1979) he finally returned to poetic form. The title sequence was a verse journal of Hughes's life working on the Devon farm owned by Jack Orchard, Carol's father.

Shorn of all mythology, these poems simply give us the experience they record with an astonishing directness. The other poems in the book were still troublingly uneven, though, and it was not until River (1983) that Hughes produced a book of uniform power. River contains the poems of a fisherman, beautifully observed, fanciful, delicate and exact. Wolfwatching (1969) was again very patchy. In 1992 Hughes collected his Laureate poems as Rain-Charm for the Duchy. The title poem is magnificent: the others record a heroic attempt and ultimate failure to establish a new courtly idiom. In subsequent years, the republication of Hughes's poems in new editions (all his animal poems together, for instance), had given a feeling that the decks were being cleared. New Selected Poems (1995) added to this impression, though it closed with new poems which seemed to reflect on the two relationships which had ended in suicide. Astonishingly, what followed was masterwork. Tales from Ovid (1997) took 24 passages from Ovid and recast them in Hughes's idiom.

The book was a distinguished addition to the tradition of imitation. Then, early this year, Birthday Letters was published unannounced. For more than 25 years, it emerged, Hughes had been writing about his relationship with Sylvia Plath (a handful in New Selected Poems), and now he gave the story as he saw it. Critics made the highest comparisons - for instance, with Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13", also about a dead first wife. Hughes's reputation and the fascination of his subject made an early over-reaction likely, but in this case the poems deserve their renown. Hughes had never focused on life between humans in this way before, and the sheer pain he recorded moved readers to tears. Their effect in the classroom, with readers who knew nothing of Plath, was more overwhelming than that achieved by any of his much-taught earlier writing. Hughes's concern with the environment puts him in the mainstream of much modern thought.

His belief that the women's movement reflected the unleashing of primeval forces was a little more eccentric, though, and in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) Hughes revealed an almost private world of abstruse learning and mythological speculation which was startlingly irrelevant to its subject. His selected essays, Winter Pollen (1994), offer a calmer account of what was none the less a very singular world- view. Hughes ably cleared his love of natural energy from the charge of loving violence for its own sake. Raising one's eyebrows at the wilder reaches of his thought seems as irrelevant as noting his archaic and ardent royalism. These things were as necessary to his imagination as the spirit- world was to Yeats, and his best work rises free of them. When time has winnowed the harvest of an extraordinarily productive career, a substantial body of very remarkable verse will be left. Ted Hughes wrote great poems in a time which cared little either for greatness or for poetry. So doing, he conferred dignity on the Laureateship which was rightly his.

It seemed only right that in August the Queen appointed him to be one of the 24 members of the Order of Merit, an honour in her personal gift. He was invested by her as OM 12 days before he died. Edward James Hughes, poet: born Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire 17 August 1930; OBE 1977; Poet Laureate 1984-98; OM 1998; married 1956 Sylvia Plath (died 1963; one son, one daughter) (one daughter deceased by Assia Wevill), 1970 Carol Orchard; died London 28 October 1998.

Question: Ted Hughes became Poet Laureate in 1984 after which other poet refused the honour?
Answer: PHILIP LARKIN